13 Days of Halloween

Boo!

Just kidding, let us make some scary games! We'll get 13 spooky days to make them and you got to turn them in before Trick Or Treat time so then when Trick or Treaters come to Glorious Trainwrecks they (and we) can play all these treats on Halloween Day!

That sounds great!

On the 18th the jam theme will be chosen so you can get started then. Whoever wants to participate post the spookiest thing you can think of in the comments and then on the 18th I'll mix up all the suggestions for a spooky grab bag of themes!

I think that three sharp knocks on the door is spooky. Especially when I open it and see no one there, sit down and then hear it again.

One time I was watching this video with headphones on (actually this happens everytime I watch this video with headphones on) and I heard a knock on the door right before the bumper-car part. I checked the door, no one was there, sat back down, listened to the video and heard the knock again. It was spooky.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Fd-wafmwY

This one actually happened to me. It's ok if you don't believe me. Me a two of my friends were walking down a street in a wealthy residential area of New Orleans. It was dusk, so you could easily see into people's houses if they had a light on and no curtains or blinds. So we are walking to a cafe and one of my friends stops and I just keep walking. Then my other friend is like "What is it?" and goes back to look at what the friend who stopped is looking at. I wait for 30 seconds or so uninterested in investigating. "Clyde, come look at this." One of them says, so I go over to where they are standing in the street and looking into a large window. I look in the window and at first I see nothing. It's just like a small living room with a counter-top bar and normal furnishings. Then I see a circus-clown in full clown-suit and makeup looking straight at us, sitting at the bar. My friend says "Is that a real person or a mannequin?" and I stare at it trying to figure it out, but then it occurs to me that it might be a real person and I got so freaked out that I involuntarily started walking away. My friends followed. So of course we begin talking about how weird it was that there was a mannequin or possibly a clown dressed up and staring out the window of that house. So as we are talking about it one of my friends says something like "Maybe they work for a circus." My other friends responds with "The circus?! Circus clowns don't look like that!" And the two of us were like "Sure they do: white face, red large lips, big eyes, poka-dotted baggy suit. The third friend is like "What are you talking about, I saw a woman with long black hair with tape over her mouth." The two of us who saw the clown were like "What??! We saw a clown." Third friend explains that she didn't see a circus-clown, she thought we were talking about the woman with tape over her mouth because she had a lot of black eye make-up or something. It was super creepy.
I walked back by there a few days later, I looked in and didn't see any mannequins.

The thing that freaks me out the most (and that also could be interesting for a game) is unnatural movement. You know how in spooky movies they'll speed up footage of people moving strangely, or run it backwards. Like that scene from house on haunted hill through the security camera of the guy walking weirdly. Also connected to things that close the distance between you and them too quickly, or that have changed their position or style of movement after having briefly been obscured or having left the frame.

The other night I tried to play Darkplaces with realtime world lighting turned on and it was kinda terrifying. Close-by light sources and fast moving objects create some pretty scary shadows. It's even creepier when you turn off the model animation interpolation and look down at your player model shadow.

I notice that I may have been assigned as snapman's theme in error (in addition to existential realization). However, I support this, and encourage snapman to try and find the horror in me if he wishes.

ok, I am tentatively in. Gonna make something on horror night itself (I know that is too late), but I don't think I have time to smash out something right now unfortunately. Got a few ideas tho :) [also, I gotta trainwreck so bad, my soul needs it]